review of nominations and VOTING for (very nebulously defined) ELECTRONIC DANCE TRACKS of the 00s

sweet like chocolate deleted

lol i forgot theo parrish. OH WELL

you want to send me a revised ballot feel free

no it's already pipecockian enough tbh

here's who i got so far

> pattern loader
> lamp fyi
> moka
> matt p

please don't let their awful taste ruin this poll!

VOTE EARLY AND OFTEN

;-)

Azzido Da Bass is 90s

I love 'Barbara Morgenstern', but it's not really danceable is it? Maybe I'm wrong. Don't want to open up that debate again though!

Exactly my thoughts on Barbara Morgan's turn too.

ok i'll get those when i get back from lunch

done, done and done

barbara morgenstern fans feel free to make a case for re-inclusion

Well, there's plenty of other stuff on the list that's not danceable: Deepchord, Voices from the Lake, Fever Ray, The Fires of Ork, Panda Bear, Pole, etc. So if you want to remove Barbara Panther, you should remove all those others too.

Don't want to open up that debate again though!

― Chewshabadoo, Thursday, May 10, 2012 11:42 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok tuomas i removed fever ray, fires of ork, panda bear and pole

motion to remove deepchord and vftl rejected

anything else you want removed?

motion to remove deepchord and vftl rejected

Why? They aren't any more danceable than the Barbara Morgenstern tracks I nominated.

why? common sense, that's why.

now use those down votes sparingly tuomas, i'm going to weigh any other requests you have very carefully, four down votes is a hell of a lot more than i intend to give anyone else, so consider yourself lucky.

What "common sense"? What does that even mean?

we already know you don't know, tuomas, don't beat a dead horse

FWIW, I'm not for removing anything from the list; I don't really like the idea that this poll should correspond to a specific aesthetic of electronic music that's defined by the bobbins crew, and that stuff that's outside this aesthetic gets removed, even though people had nominated those tunes.

well, that's going to happen anyway based on the voting, isn't it?

anyway, if you don't like it, don't vote, feel free to organize a boycott, etc

or come up w/ a better argument than finger-pointing for why an artist pitchfork described as one of the leading exponents of the "synthification of indie pop" should be included in the poll

tell you what tuomas, on the off-chance that i'm being unfair to you (because your faux-naif posting style irritates me) i'm going to add morgenstern back to the list

BUT i'm NOT going to add the ones you x'd out back to the list ... don't know how you do it in finland, but in america we hardmen choose our words carefully.

let that be a lesson to you

>:-(

ok barbara's back

rip panda bear

or come up w/ a better argument than finger-pointing for why an artist pitchfork described as one of the leading exponents of the "synthification of indie pop" should be included in the poll

Because, like I already said in the nomination thread, the track I nominated is purely electronic with no singing or "real" instruments. Yeah, I know B. Morgenstern also has tunes that are more pop than electronic music, but I wasn't gonna vote for those.

(xx-post)

rip panda bear

I only listened to this track for the first time while going through the nominations list, and I have to say I'm completely baffled why someone would nominate it in an electronic music poll. It sounds like bad imitation of psychedelic-era Beatles or something.

I mean, if someone considers it electronic music, that's fine by me, but I just don't get it...

how about this

from now on, if anybody wants anything deleted, post a youtube link and i'll be the judge

for example ...

in america, there's a show called sesame street, which sometimes asks children to play a game called "One of These Things Is Not Like The Other"

why don't you play and tell me which one of these things *doesn't* have a 4x4 dance beat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuDNKfd_WFk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ClkDbLXvdQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8DKusXE1S0

i'm sorry if you think i'm being mean, tuomas, but when you play dumb i'm gripped by an urge to treat you as if you actually were dumb

i am actually sorry, though, i know i'm being trollish and grouchy

Yeah, I know those tracks have a 4/4 beat. So do many tracks by Pole or Barbara Morgenstern or Monolake, but I still don't see Deepchord or Voices from the Lake as any more dance music than the aforementioned three. They all use just the form of dance music, as a lot electronic producers who do "head" music have done before. I just can't imagine people dancing to Deepchord at a club, but maybe that's just me?

Anyway, my actual point was that the line between dancey and non-dancey electronic music is sometimes so thin that to me it seems like futile exercise to try to disqualify certain tunes because they're not "danceable" enough. I can understand leaving out stuff that's clearly more in the pop song than dance track mold, or things that seem to be in another genre altogether (like that Panda Bear song), but I can't really see any qualitative difference between artists like, say, Deepchord and Pole that would rule out the latter.

Those echospace tracks are definitely danceable - have you never been to a night playing dub techno? The voices from the lake tracks would sit in a Dozzy set (obviously!)

really?

i mean, you're serious?

*frowns, scratches tilted head w/ one hand while putting other hand akimbo on waist, as thought bubble with giant question mark forms in air*

xpost to krayzee t

you can tap your foot to those deep chord tracks, right? that's called a backbeat. that fires of ork track has no backbeat.

Well yeah, but I wasn't talking about The Fires of Ork, which is pretty obviously ambient.

However, if you can tap your feet to Deepchord, surely you can do the same to these too?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoUmqUNlX2M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emKSwDhxujc

I think my big problem with the Morgenstern track is that the tempo is all wrong. It's about 90 bpm, most dance floor music is 115-135bpm. Yes, you can dance, but you can't Dance.

Pole is about 110 bpm, but the bass is half speed, so the feel is way off. I've heard Pole playing live in Room1 in Fabric on a Saturday night. It was great, but there was very little dancing.

Listening to those Echospace tracks directly after the Pole track and they now sound like nuclear techno.

The mistake is trying to find a single line where "electronic dance" stops and starts.

There isn't one.

Think of it more like a venn diagram with about 6 overlapping circles. At some point particular selections are just within too few of those circles to seem like a good fit.

Morgenstern is clearly within a more indie-pop/post-IDM tradition than is Echochord / Voices From The Lake. This means that she's at a bit of a disadvantage even when operating in the same tempo etc.

That said from memory her remix of Ellen Allien's "Stadtkind" was a pearler. So I'd be reluctant to rule her out except on a track by track basis.

think of it as a sphere w its center everywhere an it's circumference nowhere

the idea of ranking 50 tracks was too daunting

so i am uploading my top 50 tracks to special software where i will compare two tracks side-by-side, tournament style, and then it'll spit out a ranking

FUTURE

sure but how do you form the brackets?

tournament style isn't actually the right way to put it, it actually uses a sorting algorithm (quicksort)

so in order for the ranking to be valid, my comparisons have to be transitive

which, ha ha

Think of it more like a venn diagram with about 6 overlapping circles. At some point particular selections are just within too few of those circles to seem like a good fit.

I agree, that's why I think artists like Pole and Monolake, as well as some of B. Morgenstern's tracks, fit here. They're not necessarily super dancey, but they clearly share enough reference points with "pure" techno and house to fit in the same aesthetic. Whereas someone like, say, Fever Ray has a totally different lineage, even if her music is electronic and has beats.

Girl in the fever ray video is dancing! I wont defend it tho because I nommed it and said I didnt mind if they were removed because I wouldnt vote for it same with boc but it seems nobody cared and they ended up in the final list either way.

did you not get ballot?

Got my shortlist down to 50, just need to sort out the order. There's tonnes of stuff on the noms list I've never heard and I will try and get through it all eventually but might just stick with tracks I already know and love.

The Spotify list has the wrong Der Zyklus track (Spotify listing error it seems) it should be this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBKRYBwguqk

Definite top 10 for me.